Practical Photoshop September 2021

We’ll begin here by exploring essential landscape edits in Lightroom. These are the sorts of enhancements that you’ll want to make to most, if not all, landscapes you choose to work on. We’ll show how this is done in Lightroom Classic’s Develop Module, but if you prefer to use Camera Raw, you’ll find the tools there are almost identical. Lightroom’s tools are ideal for the kind of edits landscape photographers need to make, but if you want to go a step further with your outdoor photos, Photoshop gives you greater creative scope. So in the second part of this feature, we’ll progress to explore a few creative landscape effects. Finally, we’ll take an in-depth look at shooting landscapes while painting the scene with a flash, and show you how to piece…

RAW LANDSCAPES Why raw is best for outdoor scenes – and what to do first to your raw file If you want the maximum amount of detail and quality in your photos, shooting in raw format is a must. Raw files are much larger than JPEGs – not in terms of resolution, but in the number of colors they hold. This information can prove vital when you edit a landscape photo, as it translates to extra dynamic range, which means more detail in the shadows and highlights. Areas of a bright sky that may clip to pure white in a JPEG can often be rescued in a raw file. As such, the extra dynamic range is hugely beneficial while editing landscapes, as it means you can pull detail out of the tonal extremes,…

A useful benefit of shooting in raw format is the control it gives you over white balance. You can choose a White Balance Preset or set a color temperature in Lightroom’s Basic Panel, with the same results as if you’d done it in-camera while taking the shot. By contrast, when editing JPEGs, the white balance controls offer more rudimentary color-shifting options, with a Temperature slider that goes from -100 to +100. With raws, you have access to the Kelvin scale of color temperature from 2,000 to 50,000. To quickly correct a color cast, grab the White Balance Eyedropper Tool and click over a point that should be neutral, like a gray rock or a road. When it comes to editing your landscapes, not only does this raw control over white balance give…

WATCH THE VIDEO https://bit.ly/3k1sqsv 01 MAKE A GRAD Drag down from sky to land with the Graduated Filter to make two lines; the wider apart they are, the greater the transition. It often helps to make two separate grads in a landscape photo: one that covers the entire sky, and a second to darken the top of the frame slightly more. Hold Shift while dragging to make the lines perfectly horizontal. 02 USE THE SLIDERS After defining an area with the tool, you can use the sliders to change it. With skies, we usually want to lower Exposure slightly to darken the area. We can also try dropping Highlights. If we want to boost cloud details, we can try increasing Contrast, Clarity or Dehaze. To enhance colors, try increasing Saturation; or to boost blues, try…

Many near-perfect landscape photos are let down by a slightly wonky horizon – and it’s such an easy problem to fix, either at the time of shooting or afterwards in Photoshop or Lightroom. The Transform/Geometry Panel (confusingly named differently in Camera Raw/Lightroom Classic/Lightroom CC) offers several handy auto fixes for levelling out horizons (try the Level button) and fixing converging verticals (try Auto or Full). If these don’t do the trick, there’s also the Guided Uptight command, which lets you plot lines through the scene to snap parts of the image to the horizontal or vertical axes.…

After editing a photo in Lightroom, you can make further changes in Photoshop. Simply right-click the image and choose Edit In > Edit In Adobe Photoshop. You can choose to edit the original file or a copy. By default, the image will open in Photoshop as a TIFF file, but if you’d prefer to work with PSD files, change this in the Lightroom Preferences under External Editing (you can also choose a color space here). Once you’ve finished working on the image in Photoshop, press Cmd/Ctrl+S to save and send the edited version back to Lightroom. If you chose to edit a copy, the new version will be stacked in Lightroom with the original file.…